Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
It has been used a typical pull print system in which an image forming apparatus, a host computer that generates a print job, and a management server that manages the print job are connected through a network.
In the typical pull print system, printing can be performed in the following way. The print job is preliminarily registered in the management server from the host computer, and the print job registered in the management server is selected and downloaded with an operation panel of the image forming apparatus.
In the typical pull print system, there have been variously contrived to make a system efficient and enhance a convenience of a user.
For example, when a print setting (such as a paper sheet size setting, a color/monochrome setting) is changed in the image forming apparatus, there is proposed a technique that prevents an increase of a network traffic and avoids a condition where a resource of an image forming apparatus side is excessively used by transmitting the changed content of the print setting to the management server and rewriting the content of the print job in the management server. However, it cannot be enough that various kinds of improvement are being done for calculation of an estimated amount of charge. For example, in the case of a print job in which only a first page is printed in color and all the other pages are printed in monochrome, at an estimation, since the first page is color designation, the estimated amount has been calculated on the assumption that color printing is performed across all pages.